A Homeschooling Field Trip: Downtown Honolulu

My homeschooling schedule is just like a normal school: We have lessons from Mondays to Fridays. Today is Friday, but instead of doing usual lessons, we went to downtown Honolulu for a field trip.

The main purpose of this trip is to see my prize-winning poem being displayed at the Hawaii State Capitol.

This is the Hawaii State Capitol.

This is the central part of the capitol.

We tried to go inside the Senate but the doors were locked...

This door was locked too.

...It took a while to figure out how to get inside of the building.

We finally found my poem in the display section. We discovered it by pressing elevator buttons randomly and going back and forth between the elevator and the floors. Here I am, with my poem!

My poem is displayed at the state capitol!

Here are works of the winners for the poster design category of the same contest.

I loved the poster "My Favorite Ono Beef Taco." It was a very lovely poster. All the drawings of the vegetables and meat making up the taco had sparkly anime eyes. I liked how the foods were personified with eyes, mouths, and arms. Very entertaining.

After seeing the display, a friendly lady told us that we could watch the meeting of the House of Representatives in the gallery seats. So we went inside of the room and listened to them discussing for a while.

They were talking about bills. I didn't know what a "bill" was, so I asked Mom. She said that it's like a law but not yet agreed to become official yet. So they are making laws here...? Interesting!

I was shocked when one of the representative said that some games provoked gambling addiction to children. She also talked against some bill by saying that they shouldn't make "feel-good laws" but make "do-good laws." Another representative talked something about unregistered residents living in Hawaii. Others talked about dilemmas in reinforcing state and federal laws.

This is how House of Representatives looks like at the Hawaii State Capitol (This is a photo from Wikipedia, since we were not allowed to take pictures inside).

After seeing the discussion, we walked to the Hawaii State Art Museum, which is right next to the capitol building.

A majority of the artworks were made by local artists and children. I even saw two dresses made by the local kids. One was a graceful white dress made of plastic ribbons and bubble wrap. The other one was a cool sparkly black-and-gold dress. It was very frilly and detailed. I was surprised how talented the person was when Mom told me a student who lives in Hawaii made it.

After finishing the field trip, we had a delicious lunch at Marukame Udon in downtown. This is the inside: